Persuading Your Stakeholders

Persuade your stakeholders. But how?

Leadership is unfamiliar with the idea of seeing market opportunities from the perspective of people. Stakeholders are often trapped in the cycle of feature improvement.

Here are some tips and places to learn more.

Tips for persuading stakeholders

We are a solutions culture. Our first impulse is to come up with ways to fix things. Dropping this impulse for a moment, taking time to listen deeply, is the way to develop trust. With stakeholders, this means learning how they think, building your understanding of their concerns, and making them feel heard. Over time, you will have built their trust, which they will extend to you.

You can also develop trusting relationships with your peers at work. You can develop trust with customers. And best of all, you can develop trust with people who you’d never thought of before. With all this trust, with this deep knowledge, you can then turn on your fixing-things ideas.

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Ask around your org to see if you have a subscription to Forrester Reports

"Make sure you set up a lunch meeting with one of the stakeholders. And keep building that relationship over time."

"Diagrams, colors & patterns catch eyes. People don't like looking at boring words, and they shut down cognitively when they're feeling overwhelmed by too much information. I think of it like teaching kindergarteners."

--E. Tae

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